As the actor joins the supernatural romance Pretty Kill Machine, we revisit previously unpublished-online interviews with the creators of his 2013 Dracula series, revealing their ambitious plans and what made Meyers their ideal Count
Jonathan Rhys Meyers is returning to the world of vampires, although this time he won’t be the one sinking his teeth into anybody. The actor, who portrayed Count Dracula in NBC’s 2013 television series, has joined Pretty Kill Machine, a supernatural romance from writer-director Matthew Wilder. According to Deadline, Meyers will play the love interest of an ancient female vampire named Vee, whose first experience with romance threatens her seemingly eternal existence.
Set in and around Joshua Tree, California, the film follows Vee, who inhabits a world of elegant hotel bars and a glass-walled desert retreat, feeding not only on blood but also on human souls (sounding like something similar to the recent Vampire Carnival, where despair was sustenance for the undead as well as blood). She considers herself a “day drinker” rather than a traditional vampire.
The film is being produced by David Hillary and Yariv Lerner, with international sales handled by Quantify ahead of the American Film Market. Additional casting, including the actress who will portray Vee, has not been announced, nor has a production schedule or release date. But for Meyers, the new role represents an interesting reversal of his previous encounter with vampire mythology. In Pretty Kill Machine, he’ll portray the man who captures a vampire’s heart. Thirteen years earlier, he was the immortal creature whose romantic obsession threatened to undermine his carefully constructed plans for revenge.
That earlier production, NBC’s Dracula, was an ambitious attempt to reinvent Bram Stoker’s most famous creation for contemporary television. Although it lasted only 10 episodes, the series had considerably more in mind than a conventional retelling of the novel. At the time of its production, we spoke at length with executive producer and showrunner Daniel Knauf, creator of HBO’s Carnivàle, and series creator Cole Haddon about their approach to Dracula, their plans for the series and the qualities that made Meyers their choice to portray the legendary vampire. Their comments provide a fascinating look back at a production that hoped to take Dracula in some unexpected directions.
Reinventing Dracula for a New Generation
By 2013, vampire entertainment had undergone a significant transformation. The enormous popularity of Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and True Blood had helped turn the undead into romantic leads, while Dracula himself remained a character whose very familiarity threatened to make him seem more campy than frightening. Knauf, however, believed that the Count possessed something that distinguished him from other supernatural creatures.
“Vampires, werewolves and monsters make up the classic horror triangle,” he explained, “but Dracula is almost its own thing. He’s not just a vampire. While I agree you can do a spoof version of almost anything, once you read Stoker’s novel you find that it’s dead serious. It’s heart attack serious. He taps into very ancient, lizard-brain kind of fears. The most base of which is the fear of being consumed. And being consumed at night.
“I’m sure there were a lot of cavemen who were wondering what was going to be eating them that night,” he continued. “That’s getting down to real sitting around the campfire scary shit. Then you throw in this whole dollop of sex with penetration in the form of Dracula, and the otherness of Dracula. This ancient element. He’s older than you are, he’s smarter than you are. You think you’re the alpha predator, and you’re not.”
The series, a co-production of NBCUniversal and Sky, was set in late 19th-century London, where Dracula arrived under the assumed identity of Alexander Grayson, a wealthy American entrepreneur promising to bring revolutionary scientific advances to Victorian society. His particular interest was electricity, which he intended to use against the Order of the Dragon, a secretive organization responsible for the death of his wife and the events that transformed him from Vlad Tepes into an immortal vampire centuries earlier. Complicating matters was his encounter with Mina Murray, played by Jessica De Gouw, whom Dracula believed to be the reincarnation of his lost wife, Ilona.
The cast also included Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Jonathan Harker, Thomas Kretschmann as Abraham Van Helsing and Victoria Smurfit as Lady Jayne Wetherby.
Rather than portraying Dracula as a creature tortured by his own existence, the producers wanted someone who had long since accepted what he had become. “One thing I wanted to push was the notion that he gets very comfortable being a vampire,” Haddon reflected. “The place we start is not like the more modern approach to vampire characters where there’s a self-loathing aspect to it. You know, ‘Oh my God, I’ve become this horrible monster.’ Maybe Dracula went through that, though I really kind of doubt it. But if he did have that little period of self-loathing and angst, he’s about 300 years past it. When we find him in this thing, he is what he is. He’s completely comfortable in his skin and he’s absolutely deadly.”
A Vampire Driven by Revenge — and Love
Although Dracula’s elaborate plans for revenge provided much of the series’ momentum, Haddon saw the character as considerably more complicated than a supernatural villain seeking vengeance. “This man’s goal of vengeance is complicated by the fact that he encounters a woman who he believes to be the reincarnation of his dead wife, the only thing that ever humanized him,” he explains. “He’s a man torn inside himself between his messianic delusions that he is somehow capable of saving the world from the Order and his more self-destructive impulses. Which makes him a very complicated, interesting character who is saving the world for his own purpose. And love sort of inspires him to be more than that.”
The series also attempted to incorporate elements of the historical Vlad Tepes into its depiction of Dracula. “The interesting thing,” Haddon continued, “about the real Vlad is that he truly believed he had a vision for the world he wanted to bring to it. He wanted to bring the renaissance to Eastern Europe, he wanted to drive out a lot of the more religious thought that was going on there. He saw that the world was wrong in some way and thought, quite arrogantly, that he had the ability to do something about it.
“We dramatize that because the Order has all of these ambitions to use fossil fuels and really drive the 20th Century. Grayson/Dracula comes bearing a clean energy source that can essentially cripple the Order, and as a consequence provide a new golden age for man. He views science, the teachings of Darwin, all of those things as tools to better mankind. He’s the soldier of science in this regard versus the madness of fundamentalism on the other side.”
It was an unusual approach, transforming Dracula into a figure who believed he was fighting for the future of humanity, even as his methods and motivations remained deeply questionable. But Knauf emphasized that the real emotional foundation of the series was its love story, which he envisioned as the driving force not only of the first season but of the seasons that might follow.
“When Dracula meets the splitting image of the one woman he loved and lost, he’s faced with a choice,” Knauf explained. “Either he turns her into what he is, or he tries to find his own humanity again. In a way it’s a really perverse take on The Little Mermaid. All he has to do is turn her into a vampire and they’ll be together for all eternity, but while it’s okay for him to be this thing, to put that template over this other person is actually horrific to him. He can’t do that to her.
“He’s extraordinarily conflicted and that whole thing is at war with his other mission, which is to wipe out the Order of the Dragon in his seeking revenge. It’s kind of throwing him off of his plan. So the whole thing is just loaded with conflict, which is the stuff of drama. There’s external conflict and internal conflict going on at the same time, which is a really heady kind of brew.”
Knauf believed that Dracula’s quest for revenge was also driven by something the vampire might not fully understand about himself. He comes into this thing with the idea he’s going to take down the Order of the Dragon, and it’s not just because they killed his wife or because they took the life he knew away from him, which gives it a personal revenge aspect. But in a way there’s a redemptive aspect to it as well. He sees the one thing that is more evil than he is. This may not be in the front of his head, but it may be that by destroying these guys it will be a redemptive act. I think deep down inside he wants to be a hero.
“What he desperately understands is that revenge is not a redemptive thing. It’s kind of a bottomless pit. It certainly doesn’t bring his wife back. At the same time, there is the compulsive aspect that he is a predator and he was no Mr. Rogers in life. He was a pretty vicious bastard when he was alive in service to his people. He dealt very ruthlessly with his enemies.”
Why Jonathan Rhys Meyers Was Their Dracula
Both producers believed that much of the series’ success depended upon Meyers’ ability to portray a character who was simultaneously a ruthless predator, a wounded romantic and a sophisticated public figure. Knauf viewed the performance as considerably more demanding than simply playing Dracula.
“First of all, he’s playing a dual role with Alexander Grayson and Dracula,” he explained. “In fact, if you throw Vlad Tepes in there, it’s a third role. So he’s playing three characters. From a pure acting standpoint, it’s very challenging and Jonathan was always very much aware of it. One of the things I pointed out early on was that we were dealing with the id, the ego and the superego; we’re dealing with the Freudian model of the same man. The id being Dracula, the monster, and the lizard brain. The ego being Vlad Tepes, and the superego being this beard, this mask he’s projecting to the public, which is Grayson, the American entrepreneur. Jonathan got it. He understood it and it’s really striking to see him in his public role and then you see him having conversations with Renfield. It’s really very much two different characters and Jonathan is nuanced enough to pull it off.
“The other thing,” he elaborated, “is that there’s this incredible intensity about him. He’s really intense, as a person and in this role he just burns incredibly brightly. I think the thing that’s amazing is that he projects damage. There’s this thing with Jonathan where he’s playing this character who’s intense and it’s very real, and not the sort of put on thing you often see. Every once in a while you see behind it all and you see such despair, though it only boils to the surface in a very subtle way. You kind of have a feeling of what kind of hell this guy’s living in. He’s so wonderful in subtext and brought so much to the role.”
For Haddon, the attraction to Meyers went back years before Dracula. “The first time I saw Johnny was in Velvet Goldmine, which is one of my favorite films of the ’90s,” he recalled. “At the time there was already an intensity about him that was immediately apparent. More so, I found his acting decisions to be wildly unpredictable and yet they still felt true. There’s also challenges he’s faced in his personal life. I think the combination of all of that creates an incredible back story that’s always present on his face. There’s an inherent torment but also passion about him, which I think really defines Dracula.
“It’s a character that has suffered profoundly, but also has this terrible hunger, not just the literal hunger for blood, but a hunger for sensations in some way or another; a hunger to connect with the life he no longer feels in the way that mortals should. I see that in Johnny’s performance. It’s great to watch. It seemed to take very little for him to evoke exactly what I wanted in the character of Dracula, and it’s a treat to watch him play the role.”
Those observations take on an interesting new dimension with Pretty Kill Machine. Although details of Meyers’ character in the upcoming film remain limited, he will once again be involved in a supernatural love story centered on a vampire’s relationship with humanity. Only this time, as noted above, he’s on the other side of the equation.
The Dracula Series That Might Have Been
One of the most intriguing aspects of NBC’s Dracula is how much the producers had planned beyond its initial 10 episodes. At the time, Knauf acknowledged that developing an ongoing series around such an extraordinarily powerful character presented some challenges. Dracula was not an ordinary protagonist, and his supernatural abilities threatened to make conventional dramatic conflicts difficult to sustain.
“It was a challenge,” Knauf admitted, “but that was a challenge taken on and conquered by Cole Haddon and his approach to setting up this world. Yes, Dracula is a supernatural creature and he’s got incredible powers and strength. And Van Helsing is a pretty big bad ass in his own right, but at the end of the day they’re just two guys, so they have to play their game very carefully. It’s all about strategy. One of the things that Dracula struggles with is that in Van Helsing you’ve got someone saying you have to keep things quiet and on the down low, while Dracula is, like, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just go kill them.’ He’s always having to pull back from that instinct and going evil on their asses. It’s strategy versus balls out attack, and that is going to feed an entire season.”
The producers had also developed a larger narrative involving revenge, romance and political intrigue. “Cole mapped it out over the course of two or three seasons, so there’s a deep enough story there to sustain an ongoing television show,” Knauf revealed. “We’ve got the revenge aspect of the show, but we’ve also got all of these other characters. Then there’s this whole Dangerous Liaisons aspect in that we have a lot of triangles, romance and different people falling in and out of love with other people. So there are two or three good go-to wells to sustain a series. Going in, I knew we had a lot. This first season was like having 20 pounds of coffee that we needed to get into a 10 pound can. We had to cut a lot of incident out to fit. It was an embarrassment of riches.”
Unfortunately, audiences never got to see how those plans might have unfolded. Dracula premiered on NBC on October 25, 2013, and was canceled in May 2014 after its first season. Whatever its shortcomings, the series remains an intriguing attempt to do something different with a character who has appeared in countless films and television productions. Its Dracula was a man of science, a businessman, a revolutionary, a monster and a romantic figure who desperately wanted to reclaim something of the humanity he had lost.